


plan b

by cursedcat



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Fix-It, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), by lying to him at every opportunity, like every other person in this tag, loki and valkryie attempt to save their dumb stupid wonderful friend, really i just go absolutely hog wild on the idea that loki is alive
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 09:53:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14494374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cursedcat/pseuds/cursedcat
Summary: (or, really, plan c, d, e, f, and everything past when they stopped keeping track).[INFINITY WAR SPOILERS, ALSO!]Loki knows that Thanos is coming.  He also knows that, whatever plan he comes up with, he's going to need some backup.  Thor is out of the question (too honest), Heimdall is even worse (though he'll find out, eventually), and he'd rather face Thanos by himself than deign to ask Banner for assistance.No, he's going to have to go for the only person on the ship who might be capable of helping keep a secret from his brother.  Which is unfortunate, since she hates him with everything she has.





	plan b

Loki knows that to survive Thanos, he needs to come up with a plan better than any he’s ever contrived before.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate. His surviving Thanos would be a relatively easy thing- drop the Tesseract in his brother’s lap, allow that to draw Thanos’s attention, take the Commodore parked in the ship’s hold, and leave the battle far behind him. The issue is, doing so would doom both Thor and the entire remaining population of Asgardians, which are both things he has (unfortunately) come to terms with caring for.

To save Thor, things become more complicated. To save his people, infinitely more so. Loki considers possibilities for days after he sneaks back onto the Ark, trying desperately to figure out a way to preserve both those things without becoming a martyr.

Lying to Thor is going to be an inevitably. Regrettable, yes, considering the fact that they’d just landed on good terms, but there was no way his brother couldn’t expect such behavior from him eventually. He doubts that Thor will figure out what he’s doing in enough time to stop him, even if Thor has become much better at gleaning his true intentions. (After all, this time he’s lying for Thor’s own sake.)

It’s more difficult to lie to the Valkyrie, who is a frustratingly crucial part of his scheme no matter how many times he tries to cut her out. She’s not going to buy any of his stories, and if she suspects he’s lying to her she’ll likely end up blabbing to Thor. But if he tells her the truth out of the blue, she wouldn’t believe him either. She’s a pretty decent liar herself, he remembers, and she knows it isn’t in either of their natures to give up such an enormous truth willingly.

He has only one possible approach. He has to let her believe she’s dragged the truth from him, let her believe that she’s won whatever competition he starts between them. He doesn’t imagine her gullible, to fall for something like that; quite the opposite, he knows that her only weakness is her negative predisposition towards him. If he provokes her enough, she’ll let her anger take over. And he’ll be able to tell her the truth in a way that she believes.

Tricky, yes, but not impossible. It does involve some amount of demeaning himself towards her, which is frustrating, but he knows that with his (and Thor’s and Asgard’s and the universe’s) life at stake, he really doesn’t have time to waste.

He sets off to speak to her as soon as he has everything figured out.

\---

He finds her on the less populated side of the ship, on a bridge that overlooks the hold in which they’d gathered all of their supplies. No one comes back here, not unless they’re Thor or Heimdall looking to make some calculations about the journey, so Valkyrie is free to hide herself away and drink as much as she wishes.

Which is what she’s doing, when he approaches her, making as loud a step as possible to draw her attention to his presence behind her. For a moment, she looks startled; catching herself, she quickly furrows her brows and narrows her eyes into a look of distinct displeasure. “Keep sneaking around like that, and you’ll get yourself stabbed,” she mutters over the lip of a bottle filled with something dark and viscous.

“I imagine you’ll find an excuse to do so before the end of this journey anyways,” he replies, daring to sidle up to the railing next to her. She turns towards him, thoroughly unamused.

“If you want something, spit it out.”

Always so blunt. “As a matter of fact, I do. During your time on Sakaar, you became acquainted with the mechanisms of ships, did you not?”

She shrugs a shoulder. “Guess you could say that.”

He chuckles. “If I recall correctly, you managed to create both biologically controlled weapons and a home ship for yourself out of mere scraps. I wouldn’t be so modest.”

“Flattery gets you nowhere, asshole,” she snaps, but she averts her gaze for a second too long and Loki knows he hit his mark. 

“I need you to alter the ship. It'd be best if you could manage to give it any semblance of assault capabilities, but the main priority has creating a working escape pod that has the capacity for travel once ejected.”

He has more to say, but she cuts him off with a wave and a stern (sterner) look. “Whoa, whoa, hold on. What the fuck are you going on about? You expecting us to get attacked?”

“I’m sure we will be,” he says. “And soon.”

“Are you-” She cuts herself off, exasperated. “Alright, look. I’m not doing anything without being told what it’s for, and I’m sure as Hel not doing any favors for you.” She brings her bottle, half empty, up at a tilt and jabs the bottom of it into his chest. “You haven’t done shit to prove to me you’re not gonna return to your traitorous roots the moment your brother turns a blind eye, and there’s no way I’m letting myself be used as part of some- some elaborate scheme.”

“Then consider it an order, not a scheme. I am your prince, after all.” He doesn’t expect her to have any semblance of loyalty to him, but he does expect her to pick up on what she must have already been suspecting.

“If it’s princely duties,” she says. “Why isn’t Thor telling me instead?”

There it is. Loki hesitates, just for a moment or two, enough to let her know that she’s right in her assumption. “Well,” he says, and it’s his caught-in-a-lie voice, just a bit too high. “You can’t really expect your king to waste all of his time personally giving you orders, can you?”

A beat. She sighs, shakes her head, then tips back the rest of her drink. “I’d say ‘nice try,’ but it’s actually insulting you’d expect me to fall for that.” She turns to leave, and he waits until she’s halfway off the bridge before running after her.

“Wait,” he says, and she doesn’t stop. “I really do need you.” The desperation in his voice is only half-contrived. Without her, he’s back at square one. And they really, really don’t have enough time for that.

It gets her. She turns around. “You want my help? Try telling me what’s really going on. Then I’ll decide if you’re worth it.”

Exactly what he needs. He waits a moment, forces a reluctant sigh, and masks the relief in his tone as he concedes, “Alright, fine. But it’s- it might take some time.”

She shrugs and leans against the rail. “Floor’s yours.”

“What has my brother told you about Thanos?”

\---

Apparently, Thor hadn’t said much of anything about the entity that had been haunting Loki’s own thoughts for literal years. Perhaps his brother was making a vain (but admirable) attempt to spare Loki’s own reputation, since it was impossible to mention Thanos without also making reference to Loki’s ill-fated brush with the Tesseract. Loki appreciated the effort, but it did make his current job much harder.

He tells her in no uncertain terms about the threat Thanos poses to their lives, their people, and the state of the multiverse. She scoffs, intermittently, but her attention is no longer on her drink. She is, of course, quite familiar with the idea of an undefeatable enemy.

He explains, in a rough outline, his plan. Create escape pods so that he, and his brother, and whoever chooses to battle Thanos’s forces, can leave if they win or beat a hasty retreat if they don’t. Prepare defenses for the ship so they can at least weaken whatever forces Thanos intends to use for boarding. He has to speak very carefully to avoid dropping his last truth - his possession of the Tesseract - so that she can extract this one, too, as if it were by her own design.

He expects her to notice the flaw in his logic. He does not expect it to be for the reason she gives.

“Hold on,” she interrupts, and she has significantly sobered since her barbs earlier. Her tone holds no malice, but a surprising amount of intensity. “You keep talking about me making escape pods, or whatever, on a small scale. But what about, you know, everyone else? We have thousands of people on this ship, and there’s no way in Hel I’m abandoning them. If you really think I’m going to help you leave them behind-”

He’s impressed by the level of heroics from a person who claims not to care. “I’m not,” he cuts in. “I have a plan for everyone.”

“Which is?”

He hesitates again, this time for real. If he calculated incorrectly, and she really does go tell Thor what he’s done, then he might not have a way out of it. The plan required a great deal more subtlety than his brother was capable of, not to mention the fact that Thor would never let him use the Tesseract, not even to evacuate the Asgardians, if he understood that Loki had been lying to him again.

“I have the Tesseract,” he tells Valkyrie. She is, to her merit, not terribly surprised.

“You shithead.” And then, slightly less harshly, “What are you going to do with it?”

“Like I said. I’m going to save the rest of the civilians who won’t be a part of our escape.”

A beat. She peers down into her empty bottle, then out over the cargo, and finally back at him. “I would think your brother would be happy to hear you had such heroic intentions for it. But he doesn’t know you have it, does he?”

“He does not.”

“And if you told him, he would surely confiscate it, and you would either need to give it up or escape on your own with it.”

“I’d imagine so.”

“If you ran, Thanos would find and kill you almost immediately. But if Thor had it…” Loki is quiet. She needs to decide not to tell him on her own. “If Thor took it, he would try to give himself up to save the rest of us. In an… even bargain. And Thanos would go back on his word.” 

“Almost certainly,” Loki says. “And if my brother chooses not to act underhandedly-”

“Which he most certainly will not-”

“Then Thanos will use the power of the Space Stone to slaughter the people as he wishes,” Loki finishes. Valkyrie is appropriately sobered by the implications, tapping her bottle idly against the railing in the absence of any appropriate words to say.

“Gods,” she says finally. “This sucks.”

Loki, despite himself, laughs. “What, that our efforts to save our entire people are going to be in vain?”

“No,” she says, and turns to look him dead in the eyes. “That I believe you.”

And for a brief moment, Loki allows himself the slightest optimism that they’ll be able to escape from Thanos after all.

**Author's Note:**

> this has been buzzing around for days and i wanted to throw my hat in with everyone else making "loki lives" fix-it fics. i do plan to continue this, but i have finals and i really can't just work on it much more at the moment.
> 
> anyway, the russos can pry loki from my cold dead hands.


End file.
